January 11, 2009
Dear Mr. President-Elect:
I hear conservative commentators talking about economic issues all the time. One of the frequent things I hear is that you and the new Congress will have to pick and choose which of the social and economic programs you can implement because there simply will not be enough money in the budget to accommodate all of them. It will be necessary to be “realistic” and “practical” about the funds available. But I have never heard one of these people make the same recommendations about the budget of the Pentagon.
According to official U.S. government figures, defense is 20% of the overall federal budget. I believe that that refers to budgeted expenses only, not the costs of any wars, which are unbudgeted. It is also well to remember that the overall budget figure quoted by the official sources includes the amounts spent on Social Security and Medicare, despite the fact that those funds are kept in trust and are not supposed to be mingled with the general funds. If you remove the trust funds from the calculation (which would result in a more honest calculation of the national budget), defense spending becomes a much larger percentage of the budget, perhaps something close to half of it. Then, add on to that the amount spent on wars abroad. On top of that, I think you can add the amount spent on veterans’ benefits (another $94 billion). Once you add all these expenses, it is likely that war spending is at least half of our national expenditures. In other words, out of every dollar I pay in federal income tax, approximately 50 cents goes to pay for the military.
I bring this up not because I think we need to abolish the military immediately but because I think that we need to evaluate our priorities in this country. If, as the talking heads on TV imply, we can cut domestic spending at will but can never touch military spending, then obviously military spending is a higher priority. I would argue, on the contrary, that domestic spending is at least as important as military spending. We can have the strongest, best defense in the world, but if the country is crumbling, then what are we really defending? We have to have a country worthy of the defense we lavish on it.
There are other considerations here, of course. Various people have a monetary interest in any kind of federal spending. If someone has grown wealthy on his federal military contracts, not only will he be unwilling to give up his lucrative contracts, but he may also have sufficient discretionary income to pay for effective lobbying in Congress and to make substantial campaign contributions. Those of us who benefit from governmental domestic spending (unless there are lucrative contracts there, too) are its beneficiaries precisely because we have no discretionary income to send lobbyists to Washington. If we are lucky, we just have sufficient time to write letters to our elected officials.
Who gets to decide our priorities, then? If setting them were up to me, I would prefer that our defense budget be reduced to a smaller portion of our total spending and that the funds be put to work on our domestic issues, instead. If defense spending were actually only 20% of the overall budget, that might be a better proportion. One little-known corollary of Murphy’s Law is that spending expands to fit the funds available. If the Pentagon were required to work with a smaller budget, the good people there would find efficiencies that would make it possible to do their work without the extra ability to spend–just as all the other governmental agencies have managed to do. The hard part is convincing those with an interest in the status quo that this is the right thing to do. I hope you agree with me that we must re-arrange our priorities, and I hope that you can muster the necessary arguments to make it happen.
Sincerely,
Lisa G.
Chicago, IL
Letters to Public Officials 